Why would I want a drone swarm in VLEO? That seems like a really hard place to effectively use drones from compared to pretty much any alternative.
Connection, remote sensing, and mesh networking are useful.
Also, it is rare to have anything that needs 30 min response time. Most things can be handled by local resources or wait for an airplane. Good example is that the US is working on hypersonic missiles and deploying them around the world.
VLEO has its uses.
But I don’t understand the point. Satellites already fly indefinitely and can drop payloads of kinetic energy weapons. Why all the complexity of VLEO and drones? What could you that’s impossible with other, simpler, already-extant weapons systems?
Are you thinking of something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment#2003_Unite...
Again, you probably wouldn't bother with VLEO for that, too much extra complexity with no obvious advantage vs VLEO.
Assuming the tech works, you can move the sat to any orbital plane, making it significantly harder for an adversary to track all of your vleo assets.
Also, the article doesn't say that they are at 60mi, just that VLEO goes down to 60mi. The satellites are likely to be higher because there is less drag.
That's, ah, a huge 'all' :) They'd be moving at about 8-10 kilometres per second. The vehicle is not _really_ 'flying in the air', it just looks a bit like that. It's in orbit at terrifying speeds. Your 'drones' would require very extensive heat shielding. They would not be at all cheap. And why use this rather than a normal, cheaper, less complex LEO satellite? Or an ICBM. If you want to arbitrarily drop heavily shielded gadgets on someone's head at silly speeds, the normal tool is an ICBM (the gadgets usually contain a nuke, not a drone, mind you).